In its short history, Internet usage has been mainly driven by portals and search engines, such as Yahoo! and Google. Recently, the rapid growth of social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, has revealed a new trend of Internet usage. Social networking generally relates to services and tools that help users maintain and expand their circles of friends usually by exploiting existing relationships. Social networking sites have shown potential to become the places on the Internet where many people spend most of their time, thus making these sites the main entry point for online activity. Often times, these social networking sites can become the focal point of sharing information, such as links, multimedia, music, and the like.
In general, social networking sites and other online services of the Internet offer a mix of features and tools, such as message boards, games, journals or web logs (“blogs”). Many of these sites try to build communities around multi-media or popular culture, such as television, film, music, etc. These sites and their features are designed to keep users clicking on advertising-supported pages of the site. Thus, the known social networking sites employ a closed platform of services that attempt to keep their user-base captive to the site.
One feature of social networking sites is providing recommendations for content, such as video, audio, images, etc. Unfortunately, given the proliferation of social networking sites and their membership, it can be difficult to trust their recommendations. In addition, often times the recommendations are of little or no interest to the user.
Accordingly, it would be desirable provide methods and systems for providing relevant recommendations for content.